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- [00:00]
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- [02:40]
Charlie Sykes
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to the to the Contrary podcast. There is a new book that argues that dissidents are not extraordinary superheroes, but one Ordinary people who align their actions with their inner moral truth because they ask themselves, can I live with myself? A question that, quite frankly, a lot more people should be asking these days, don't you think? And joining me on today's podcast is the author of that book, Gal Beckerman, a staff writer at the Atlantic magazine and the author of the new book how to Be a Dissident, which again, I mean, it hits home because not only are many of us dissidents, but it does occur to me that we may have to be dissidents for a lot longer. I mean, there's a lot of people who are saying, you know, we're going to get through this, the fever is going to break. And then there are those of us who have these moments where we think this could last a very long time. And so the question how to be a dissident takes on more than just momentary relevance. So tell me why you wrote this book right now, what moment you think you are meeting.
- [03:54]
Gal Beckerman
Well, you know, the real immediate impetus for the book was a feeling that I had and that I know a lot of people shared with me in the first months of Trump's current term when suddenly we saw these very powerful, know, institutions, people, you know, in American life, you know, prestigious law firms, academia, media, executives. I mean, we all, we all sort of remember this cascade of stories of people who were bending to exercises of executive power that, you know, I had never seen in my lifetime quite exercise like that. And I had a sort of a reckoning moment where I thought, oh, wow, we don't really know in America how to deal with this. We, you know, in spite of the fact that we have this self conception of being these rugged individualists who, you know, aren't going to do what we're told to do, we're going to do what we want to do, that really wasn't the, you know, what was happening among the most powerful people in the country. And so I did what I always do in these instances, which is sort of searched outside of my immediate context. You know, I look to history because I've written books about other social movements before. So I've been thinking about dissidents for a long time. I looked outside of the United States to countries where this situation is much more dire, of course, than our, our own, to see how people dealt with it. And then I tried to sort of zero in on the individual. You know, I, I, I, I, you know, it's interesting to look at social movements and how they form. And I've done, I've Done some of that in my own writing life. But I really wanted to understand what happens in a person's head and their gut, you know, when they make a decision to push back. And how does that actually happen?
- [05:38]
Charlie Sykes
Push back and break away? No, that moment you're describing, I think was so powerful. And I'm not sure that a lot of people have really worked their way through it because I think that when you see what's happening, there are the people who feel, well, maybe the institutions will all work, maybe the fever will break, maybe we will win, but then maybe we won't. And so it is that decision to say, okay, I'm going to stand against this, even if it costs me something. And also, well, let's just back up a bit because I wanna get to the 10 qualities of a dissident and some of these historical parallels, some of which were successful, some of which were successful on a moral basis, but not necessarily on a political basis. But you talk about the world we have to navigate that we're facing. The authoritarian threat we're facing is not just from government, as you point out. I mean, political leaders use fear. Digital technology is dehumanizing people. And the culture actually can be co opted by authoritarian forces. And at the same time, and you talk about this a lot, things are moving at warp speed, they move too fast. This is a moment maybe we should be stepping back and engaging in reflection, but we don't have that particular luxury. So the authoritarian threat we're facing now, I mean, it has parallels, but in some ways, as I read your book, I'm thinking it really is unparalleled, it is unprecedented. A word that we use way too often these days.
- [07:08]
Gal Beckerman
I mean, I think the thing that unites or the feeling that unites all of these instances, you know, you could look at the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, or you could look at the onslaught of technology and the things that it feels like it's taking away from us. The underlying, you know, theme for me or the, the feeling for me is one of being flattened, of being, I mean, dehumanization. Dehumanization sounds like a, I mean, sometimes like a clinical way of describing it, but I think it captures this, this feeling of some part of our agency, some part of our, our ability to make choice being taken away from us. And I think what's interesting to me always about the dissident and lots of situations, this book goes back to ancient Greece and at, you know, people in Tehran today. And it is that they are extremely attuned to something that Vaslav Havel, the, the Czech dissident playwright who would then become president of his country once, once communism ended there, Vaslav Havel thought very deeply about what makes a dissident. And he, he pinpointed an idea that I really like, which is called the pre political right. So this is, this is a whole sort of basket of sort of, you know, that contain the conditions of a, of a free and dignified life that are apart from our ideologies, you know, our political causes, you know, all the things that we actually yell at each other about all day long. But they, but, but it contains, you know, being able to read whatever you want to read, wear your hair. You want to wear your hair, have an opinion that you want to have. Also pursuing your economic interests, you know, not seeing your neighbors or yourself being subjected to violence, you know, a whole, a big bucket of things I think a lot of us would actually agree upon. But you know, we get sort of sectioned off into our polarized tribes, the world. Yeah, but I think that, that the dissident I see again and again and again in a society like Iran, just to take an example that, you know, is attuned, a woman there is attuned to, oh, I'm being told that I have to wear my hair covered, you know, that, that is, you know, that I don't have the freedom not to do that, you know. And that sensation, I think, is a pre political sensation. And so we need to train ourselves a little bit more in this own country, in our own country to think in those terms. I think it actually would be good for our politics in a way.
- [09:44]
Charlie Sykes
I thought we had actually. I mean, wasn't that, I mean, our American self conception was, of course, those were sett issues. Of course you get to wear your hair the way you want to wear your hair. Of course you get to read the books that you want to say. These were never in question here.
- [09:56]
Gal Beckerman
Right.
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Charlie Sykes
I mean, so what is it we have to relearn that they're fragile or that we actually value them more than other things?
- [10:05]
Gal Beckerman
I think sometimes there are these sort of shocks to the system. To me, you know, looking at what happened in Minneapolis, for example, was, was an example of people. Look, I'm sure that most of the folks who live in Minneapolis who were taking the actions that they did against ICE and to protect their immigrant neighbor, I'm sure they have political views. I'm sure they're in one of the tribes, you know, that we're talking about. But I actually think that what generated that action and that bravery. You know, when you think about some of the steps people had to take once folks were killed, you know, for monitoring ICE or, you know, for, for helping their neighbors, that was pre political. I think what people were responding to at a very deep level is that there was something that felt kind of morally, humanly wrong about how individuals around them were being treated.
- [10:51]
Charlie Sykes
And you. I mean, dissidents is a choice to remain human in dehumanizing times. And that's a different way of saying that. Right?
- [10:57]
Gal Beckerman
Exactly, exactly, exactly. And, you know, and so I actually saw in that instance and in other instances, you know, whatever you believe politically about, you know, immigration in this country, just the reaction of people to be able to. To. To engage in what my. One of my colleagues at the Atlantic, Adam Serwer, called neighbourism.
- [11:17]
Charlie Sykes
Yes.
- [11:18]
Gal Beckerman
You know, to sort of go back to this sort of basic understanding of how we treat one another, that was actually very hopeful for me because it sort of flew beneath, again, the normal ways that we interact with each other, which is through our templates that were given.
- [11:35]
Charlie Sykes
So let's go back to that question, that basic question that people have to ask. Can I live with myself? What am I prepared to do? And this question, I think, is powerful because I look at a lot of the people who have been bending the knee, going along with it, agreeing to support things that they know would have been five minutes ago would have shocked their conscience. So when they ask themselves, can I live with it? They go, yeah. And you expand that list of things you're willing to live with. So what makes that difference between. I'm actually thinking of this 1941 article, I think it was by Dorothy Parker, who goes Nazi. It's like people make this decision who decides to go along with something and who decides to be the dissident. It's an amazing essay. So give me that. So talk to me about that question, that centrality of that question. Can I live with myself as the moral dividing line?
- [12:35]
Gal Beckerman
Yeah. Well, I would ask whether actually most people are really pondering that question. The folks that you're talking about, who are bending the knee, who are doing what they need to. I think that there's a process that happens before they get to the question, which is that they immediately think about their own self interest, what they have to lose. Like they don't actually want to ask the question because the answer to the question might cause them to have to act in ways that. That they would feel work would work against their immediate interest or even, you know, let's put it in the, in stark terms. You know, they're losing their job, the safety of their family, the safety of themselves. You know, there's, there's, there's consequences for really asking yourself question in a serious way. You know, I borrowed that, that idea of that question from Hannah Arendt, from the German philosopher who, you know, came up with that, that concept or that idea that that question was, you know, existed in the minds of dissidents because she was looking at, at people, Germans who resisted the Nazis and trying to figure out, you know, what actually made for someone who took that stance because it was so incredibly rare in Nazi Germany. And she came to an interesting conclusion which I think is actually, you know, has resonance for our moment too. She said the people who resisted were not people who had a strict, like a strict moral code. And you could, you could transpose that in our day to having like a strict sort of ideological code that they're following. Because those people were able to, to go from thou shalt not kill to thou shalt kill. They just needed rules to live by. Right. It's the people who were sort, who were perpetually asking themselves in every situation anew, can I live with myself? You know, because they approached it not with a set of rules, but with actually listening to their, to their conscience, to their, to their sort of where their gut was. And that's, that's a very different orientation to the world, I think, than most of us carry around with us day to day.
- [14:41]
Charlie Sykes
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- [15:48]
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- [16:36]
Charlie Sykes
Well, let's walk through this because you have a sort of a chapter by chapter, you know, breaking down, you know, the tour, you know, the core qualities the dissidents have. So, you know, each chapter has a theme. And so I want you to explain and then I want to give maybe a little bit of pushback on each one. So the first three, by the way, just give people a taste of where we're going here, what it takes to be an effective dissident, which is kind of surprising. Be alone, Be pessimistic, be funny. And number four is be reckless. So we're going on a journey here. So be alone. What does that mean?
- [17:13]
Gal Beckerman
So I guess to anticipate your pushback, obviously to make real change in a society, you need to find people who you, you know, who agree with your point of view and who can join together and your power is increased, magnified by joining with them. And there is a chapter later on in the book called Be Loyal, which is sort of where I explore that idea. But I actually think it was important for me to focus on this kind of almost existential, you know, moment where you realize that the way that you think and believe and what that gut is telling you, the answer to that question, can I live with myself? Is going to put you in opposition to, to your, to your social world, to the, to the people who, who you otherwise agree with about everything else or who you might be politically aligned with or might be in your tribe. You know, and that could mean your family, it could mean your, your city, it could mean, you know, in some instances your whole country. But it, but it, it is reckoning with some of the vertigo that comes along with that and sort of finding yourself then on the other side of it and saying, it is still worth it for me to embrace this aloneness because that is going to allow me to maybe find my. Find the people who I can be in solidarity with and sort of, you know, live. Live a life that feels more true to myself.
- [18:35]
Charlie Sykes
Well, no pushback here, as you might imagine. You know, I'm. I'm an only child, so I'm, I'm used. I'm used to going my own way. And I think that that is really one of the breaking points, I think, from the people who go along is, you know, are you willing to stand by yourself? Because the price is really. Are you willing to say, you know, that, okay, I'm going to be losing friends, I'm going to be losing family, I don't want to be part of the crowd. I am willing to stand aside even if that means being lonely. Now, some of us are easier being lonely. You know, as I wrote in my newsletter yesterday, I mean, if you, if you want a friend, get a dog. Maybe that's why I'm obsessed with dogs, because. So, no, I totally. I actually felt very seen on this one and was kind of surprised because there's all this solidarity and now you have to get together and, you know, go and, you know, be part of big things. I think at a certain point that willingness to stand aside and stand alone is absolutely crucial. Okay, so be pessimistic because I'm being. I am being force fed the demands for Hopium every single day. So what do you mean when you say be pessimistic?
- [19:40]
Gal Beckerman
So I think it's a strategic stance to take that attitude, I think, and let me explain, first of all, I think we need to make clear that pessimism is not the same as fatalism. Right?
- [19:50]
Charlie Sykes
Fatalism.
- [19:50]
Gal Beckerman
Materialism is the belief that any everything will. Is. Is bad and is always going to get worse. Right. Definitively. Pessimism is the belief that it will probably get worse, you know, and in that probably is the possibility to change it from. From getting worse or to mitigate the harm that you see coming from things getting worse. And if you think about the opposite attitude, which is optimism, the belief that things will probably get better. Well, I don't know. I think that could lead to a certain amount of passivity. You know, if you, if you think complacency, right. If you think authoritarianism is creeping into our country and you say, well, you know what? People won't really Let this happen, or it'll work out.
- [20:30]
Charlie Sykes
Everything will work out.
- [20:32]
Gal Beckerman
Our better angels will prevail. You know, the Democrats will get their act together. Whatever it is that you sort of want to tell yourself, it could actually keep you from acting in the here and now to do what you can. And I think that's what pessimism ultimately gives people is an ability to say, look, I can't actually tell. It's another way to put it is hope without expectancy, which I really like. And in fact, I use a phrase in the book, hopeful pessimism, which sounds a little funny.
- [21:00]
Charlie Sykes
No, no, this is. This is. This. Again, I feel there's no pushback here, because I do think that one of the problems we've had is this failure of imagination, this sort of belief. Well, you know, the pendulum swings back, and, you know, this. This can't last. So, you know, stuff's gonna, you know, figure out, and. And then you look back at certain parts of history and you realize, well, maybe. Maybe it doesn't. I'm reading a book. I actually, you know, I don't want to sound pedantic here, but I just. The other day, I ordered some of the books of St. Augustine, not just because we have an Augustan pope, but also, like, what must it have been like, you know, writing after the fall of Rome. I mean, you're sitting and trying to explain the world. Look at the world after. After the Huns have just sacked Rome. So the world is ending. What was he thinking? What was his worldview? And I thought that was the kind of relevant thing maybe we ought to be reading right now as opposed to. Yeah. You know, after the midterms. Everything's gonna be fine. It's not gonna be okay. So be alone. Be pessimistic, be funny. This is shockingly controversial because every once in a while, you know, I'll try to keep a sense of humor. And people say, charlie, you know, these are serious times. You know, you shouldn't. You know, you should not be making light of any of this. And my answer is, if I didn't make light of some of this stuff, I would lose my freaking mind. So what do you mean, be funny?
- [22:19]
Gal Beckerman
Well, that is. I mean, that is one aspect of it is just, like, for your own sustenance, you know, to be able to sort of stay feeling sane. But I actually think humor is quite powerful. And if you look at. I mean, if you look at who Trump is targeting lately and who makes him angriest. Comedians. And I think that there is a very. There's a very distinct reason for this, which is that what humor does is it. It inverts the world. It allows us to say that the things that we sort of. I mean, if you listen to a good comedian, this is almost always what they're doing in observational humor. They're saying these things that you take for granted that you think are always, you know, just a natural part of the order of things. Let's play around with them. Let's throw them up in the air and see how silly they actually look. And that is what is happening, you know, with a leader, with a powerful leader who wants to be seen as a deity and putting his face everywhere. Like, if. If you actually make fun of that, you are dismantling. And one of the interesting kind of data points I have in that chapter is before the French Revolution, there were apparently these kind of pornographic jokes about the king that were circulating in. In cafes all over Paris. And we know about these because the police, they're in the police records from the 18th century. Police were sort of trying to track down who was sharing these jokes. Why? Because they were dangerous. They were. It was dangerous for people to begin to sort of imagine the king was supposed to be like a deity, as a mortal person, you know, and as a human being, just like anybody else. And that led the path to, you know, getting his head cut off. Because. Because it created a situation where people could sort of begin to imagine a different reality for themselves.
- [23:59]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. The opposite of awe and fear is ridicule. Right. So, I mean, I really become a huge fan of both Jimmy Kimmel and Colbert. But I remember right after Trump's reelection, I wrote about. I said, you know, we have to keep our sense of humor. And citing Charlie Chaplin's legendary, iconic movie the Great Dictator. This is when Hitler and Mussolini were in power and he just relentlessly mocked them. And I thought that was. This is a perfect example of keeping your sense of humor at a really dark period of time. So we've gone from be alone, be pessimistic, be funny, to be reckless. Reckless. Because a lot of the rest of your book is describing slowing down and being very prudent. So what do you mean, being reckless?
- [24:49]
Gal Beckerman
Well, I think that if you look at the career of a dissident, at some point, there is a moment where they put their own life on their line, their own bodies on the line, in order to illustrate the injustice that they're trying to. To, you know, to change in society. I mean, the. The big example that I have in that book, which you know, we don't think about it as recklessness because it was successful. Is the children's crusade In Birmingham, Alabama, 1963, you know, where, where the civil rights movement put children on the front line. You know, they were attacked by dogs and fire hoses. And I sort of went back and looked at the conversations that took place. You know, Martin Luther King was very tortured about this and because the parents in the community said, why are you making our children cannon fodder? I mean, luckily, you know, no, nobody was really harmed in that. And it did, it had the effect that it want, that King wanted, which is, it created a moment, and this is what recklessness can do, is it created a moment of tension and of contrast. So if you were watching that on television in the north, you're a northern white who was watching that on television, you know, you understood exactly how violent and cruel segregation was. So that, that is, that, you know, but, but I, but I really wrestle with recklessness in that chapter and actually point to Augustine, to bring Augustine back into it. Who, who thought about martyrdom and sort of what is legitimate martyrdom and what is martyrdom? That is a kind of self destruction which, which, which, which this reckless behavior can be. And, and he had a rule that I actually kind of borrowed a little bit, which is, is it inward focused or is it outward focused? Are you, are you focused like Dr. King on sort of the effects that this recklessness could have in terms of, you know, in his case, changing things? Yeah. Gaining him the kind of capital that he would need, the symbolic capital to be able to get rights for the black citizens of Birmingham, you know, or are you just thinking about yourself and sort of glorifying your own righteousness, you know, and so obviously these things are not always easy to parse. Right. I mean, and I say that in the book, but, but it is worth thinking about.
- [26:55]
Charlie Sykes
So be immortal. What does that mean?
- [26:58]
Gal Beckerman
Yeah, no, I, I, so a lot of these and I, you know, I, I did a kind of a, this wasn't a comprehensive survey of dissonance, but I tried to, to read as many memoirs as I could and talk to as many living dissidents as I could to get a sense of sort of what makes them tick. And I kept coming up against this one sort of duality that they have, which is that they, they both have their feet sort of permanently firmly planted on the ground. You know, if you take somebody like Alexei Navalny, the, you know, anti corruption activist who was ended up being poisoned by Putin and then killed again, you know, we're not killed again, but killed once again to Russia. He wanted to change Russian society. He was focused on his fellow. That the kind of lives his fellow Russians were living, not just democracy in a kind of abstract way, but, you know, health care and education and the issue of corruption, which he felt was draining the country of its resources. This is very tangible on the ground stuff. Right. On the other hand, Navalny was a religious or a man of faith, and he talks repeatedly in his prison memoirs about his commitment to a kind of. To what he called righteousness. And righteousness, for him is a. Is a quality that extends sort of beyond his own life. You know, it exists long before he's here, and it will exist long after him. And he's doing his work sort of in service of that. And, and what I find interesting about dissidents is they're able to kind of connect these two aspects of themselves. You know, they're not. They're not like prophets in the sense that, like, their heads are sort of in the clouds, you know, just seeing the cycles of history on this huge distance. They're doing the work here and now, what they can do right now, but they have motivating them these much higher forces. And I don't think, you know, I don't think I need to be religious, like. Like they are. Only they could be, you know, a commitment to the state of the earth or to an exalted sense of what justice means. You know, it's. It is. That is the kind of immortal mode as I describe it in the book. I see.
- [29:03]
Charlie Sykes
I think this is important, you know, that you may not win, you may not serve, but what you do is going to echo for a very, very long time, you know, And I think as you use these examples to show, you know, the moral clarity, you know, kind of outlive, you know, your. Yourself. Okay, so the next one, we're at chapter six. Well, let's do six and seven at the same time because they feel kind of similar. Be a doubter and be an outsider again. This feels like it goes back to the being alone. And what do you mean by be a. Be a doubter? Like not, not, not jump on every hot take you see on your Twitter feed, which I'm off, by the way. So.
- [29:39]
Gal Beckerman
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that this is. This is sort of asking questions, sort of having a critical perspective on. On the aspects of reality that you're asked to just sort of accept and, and take is for granted. You know, at the very basic level, that's what it is. And you know, that's something that we're normally kind of been allowed to do in American society. But, but it's, but if you look outside of our country, you know, at a place like Saudi Arabia, you know, where there are, you know, religious laws in place, you know, that dictate people's behaviors and you know, it's, it's, it's meant to create an environment that feel, that's supposed to feel like natural, that this is how it's always supposed to be. So being able to be sort of the fish that questions the water that he's swimming in is, is, is really like an important aspect. Yeah, yeah.
- [30:30]
Charlie Sykes
No, I mean, and the skeptic is most likely to be the, you know, well, dissidents have to be skeptics in some way. I mean, I, I think this refusal to accept official narratives, again, this is, this is part of, there's, I guess there's, there's a double edged sword. You know, we watch some of my old friends who've become maga and I go, why you believe all this stuff? Where is your skepticism? On the other hand, universal skepticism can lead to conspirac. You don't believe anything. And we're in this position right now where literally I think every day people say, what do I believe? Who do I trust? You know, what is real, what is not real? Right. So you need to be morally skeptical, but not like so open minded your brains fall out.
- [31:14]
Gal Beckerman
Yeah, no, I think that, I think you're, you're touching on an important sort of tension, you know, which is, you know, if you, if you start to question everything, then you also, you know, you also will never lead to action. Right. Because you're, because it doesn't make, nothing actually makes sense to you anymore. But if you're in the MAGA bubble. Right, and which provides kind of a narrative for almost everything that happens, even when there's part of you that feels like. I'm sure that there are people who walk around accepting and hearing the narrative and repeating it on any given issue that happens. And there's part of them that thinks, wait a second, this can't be totally right or there must be questions that need to be asked here and they don't want to hear the questions that I think is where, because it will force them into that kind of self critical mode. You know, I think we could use more of that.
- [32:04]
Charlie Sykes
More of that, A lot more of that. Yeah, I think you're seeing some of that obviously with whether it's the fallout from The Epstein files or particularly the Iran war, where I think it kind of breakthrough. So the outsider, I think, feels like it goes back to that first chapter, that kind of a willingness to be marginalized, to be irrelevant. You know, I mean, every once in a while, Charlie Sykes, you are absolutely irrelevant. And you know what? I'm completely fine with it. If they, if, if the price of relevance is that I have to buy into all of this stuff. Well, no, I can't live with myself. So I'm, I am willing to be marginalized.
- [32:38]
Gal Beckerman
Right, Right. No, I mean, I think, I think that is, that is the price of it sometimes. Yeah, for sure.
- [32:44]
Charlie Sykes
So be a witness.
- [32:45]
Gal Beckerman
Yeah. This, this actually, this, this really spoke to me as a kind of a dissident activity because, you know, partly, you know, it comes out of just people telling you, you know, if you live in a society where people telling you not to see the things that you're seeing in front of yourself or history that you know exists because it's uncomfortable or that it doesn't fit with a, with a narrative that is a dominant narrative, it's the impulse to say, oh, just because you're telling me not to look, I'm going to look, you know, and, and to document and to see. And I think this one actually a lot of us understand fairly well because we all walk around with these, you know, cameras in our, in our pockets
- [33:24]
Charlie Sykes
and, you know, yes, literal witnesses.
- [33:28]
Gal Beckerman
Yes. There's up to the number of circumstances, you know, where people pull out those phones as an almost an instinct to say, I'm, I'm here and I'm going to see and I'm going to record and watch something that's happening where if I wasn't here to see it, there could be kind of an injustice that happens that, you know, could, could get lost to time.
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- [35:17]
Charlie Sykes
be a disruptor.
- [35:18]
Gal Beckerman
Yeah, I mean, I think this, this ties into the kind of recklessness idea very much because connects to the notion that you create, you have to create the kind of tension that will allow people to, to recognize, you know, what it is that you're fighting against, the thing that's, that's wrong in society that you want to, to prevent. I mean, this is, this goes back to. It's something that King wrote a lot about in his letter from a Birmingham Jail. You know, he said, you know, I'm, I'm willing to be an extremist, but an extremist in the sense that it, it points us to, to the things that need to be fixed.
- [35:56]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, so chapter 10 is be able to begin again, understand that it's a long process. You want to build a society that's worth living in. So then you get to the big question, which is like, okay, what do we do? How do we behave? And how do we act ethically in a world sliding toward not just authoritarianism, but in shidification? So I guess the question is, and you ask this question, what does personal responsibility look like today?
- [36:27]
Gal Beckerman
So, you know, this is the thing that I sort of emerged at the end of this book with. It's not a set of, you know, people. People often are asking me as I'm talking about this book, 10 points, as if I'm a dissident, you know, but the truth is, is like I approach this question from a, from a place of, you know, worrying about myself honestly, saying, would I be able to stand up to the pressure? Would I be able to do the thing that I felt was the right thing to do when I felt what, you know, I call in the book the moral nausea, you know, that we often experience day to day. And, and I emerge from this book with a sense that I need to embrace moral choice. I mean, and this sounds Like a very fundamental step. But I actually think it's one that we don't, you know, just like asking yourself the question, can I live with myself? It's something that we don't often do because we escape into conformity. We escape into self preservation and. But I think I now sort of, you know, if I'm different after writing this book, it's that I approach situations that I'm confronted and whether it's something I read in the newspaper that I feel implicated in somehow. You know, I see a picture of a dead child and I think I am. I'm involved with this in some way, or, you know, or I see somebody on the street or in my community that they know that needs help, you know, So I now understand that I have choices that I need to make. And the choice I just want to emphasize can be that I can't do something in that moment. Right. I mean, that is a choice, but I understand it as a choice. And that returning to a sense of agency and ability to actually make meaning in my life through the choices that I make is the big difference here. And the other thing I'd say is that. That, like the. It's easy to understand these as burdens and responsibilities. Right. I mean, that's. Does feel like a burden, you know,
- [38:21]
Charlie Sykes
to open up sometimes. Yep. Oh, shoot.
- [38:24]
Gal Beckerman
Now I have to have a feeling about this and I have to do something about it. But I also think I also came to see, and I borrowed this a bit from Jean Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher. Talked about, you know, our. Our making of moral choices in our life as a kind of creative act. You know, the idea that you get to make your life in this way. I mean, you get to stand on those moral crossroads and say, I'm going to make the choice that feels right in my gut.
- [38:54]
Charlie Sykes
That's what makes us human.
- [38:56]
Gal Beckerman
Yeah, it's a great benefit of being a human animal. We get to do that. And I really do feel like when I look back on my life that it'll be those choices, even when they were really hard, that will be the thing that made me feel like I had a meaningful life. So I really, you know, Sartre says, you know, each one of these choices is like brushstrokes in a portrait that we're painting of ourselves. And I love that idea because it takes it away from feeling like this incredible weight to being something that actually allows me. It's the substance with which I'm creating a meaningful life.
- [39:34]
Charlie Sykes
One of the most influential books that I Ever read, and I remember reading it back in probably my early 20s, was Viktor Frankl's book on the meaning of life where he asked you to imagine, you know, lying in your deathbed. You know, you're 95, 98 years old, and you're looking back on the meaning of your life, but also the decisions you made at various points in your life and how they contributed to that. So as that lens. And I always thought that that was very, very powerful, you know, to see your life as having meaning, as having a narrative. Okay, so among the things that I really enjoy in your book, you know, with the, you examine the various movements of kind of varying success. You know, Soviet dissidents with the samizat literature, you know, the American revolutionaries, the suffragettes, the civil rights activists, you know, all of these movements grew up. And you, you describe how they, they cultivated their ideas in what you call protected spaces before going public. And, and, and, and this is the part where I found troubling. I found almost all of it inspiring because you basically argue, correct me if I'm getting this wrong, these are my summaries, that effective descent requires slow, careful cultivation in small groups before it can successfully challenge mainstream power structures. So you have to incubate, you have to develop them, you have to have a willingness for nuance. You need to slow down. What's troubling is that that's absolutely right. But it's so hard to see that happening right now that I'm watching the activists and they are, you know, struggling to set their hair on fire. There is a reluctance to slow down. There is that demand that we must, you know, you know, act right now, even if our ideas have not been fully cooked. And what you're saying is, no, you maybe need to cook some of these ideas before you roll them out and then, but, and the nuance, social media and the kind of debate we have right now does not incentivize any of that, which is troublesome.
- [41:37]
Gal Beckerman
It's not just that it doesn't incentivize it. It actually, it molds us in its image and definitely molds social movements in its image. I mean, this. So this was the premise of my last book, book, which was called the Quiet before. And it very much was this idea that social movements have now sort of taken on the form of social media, the biases of social media, which is, you know, loud attention grabbing, you know, trying to do everything to be sort of bombastic in the way that they, they share their ideas. And, and, and I looked at this sort of Entire pre digital history of people using other forms of communication, like, like letters and petitions and samist. And I thought, you know, each of those communication media, like, allowed the people who were using it to do a very different kind of thing. It allowed them to actually, you know, build in significant and deliberative ways towards much more effective, you know, change. Yes, this is extremely hard to do today because the trend that, you know, that in our entire society is headed into. But I will say one thing that I find actually kind of hopeful about protests in America, which I feel is a form of maturity in this direction. I don't know how you feel about the no Kings Day protests, but one of the things that I have remarked about them is that they are not a kind of like a one and done. We're all going to go to Washington, D.C. on one day under one single banner. They're incredibly diffuse. They're incredibly. Their intent on every community with the people that you know in your community. And there's now like, I think they've done three or four. There's. Every time there's more and more of them, and there's like thousands of these individual little protests. They, they don't demand that you sign on to one particular cause. You know, you're right. The only thing you sign on to is you have to be against authoritarianism in America. But that can mean you don't like the immigration policy, that can mean you're LGBTQ person, that could mean you don't like the war. But it's a big enough banner that anybody can sort of enter, which is a good thing, I think. And, and the most important thing is it creates a sense of. Of continuity. You have to keep coming back. You know, you don't. You're not going. It provides this kind of series of thresholds. Okay, you came to one, can you come to another one? Can you go to another one? And so you're ramping up your level of dedication and your level of commitment to the people around you and to the ideas and to the, to the idea of protest. So all that I think is actually a break with some of this. Of the metabolism of social media, which is, I really do feel, is kind of infected the way movements, you know, when we look at something like Black Lives Matter, for example, you know, was very much in that vein.
- [44:28]
Charlie Sykes
Well, you know, I mean, some people would push back against no Kings. And by the way, I don't agree with this, but this is, this is. It's all performative. And you talk about the performative trap Right. Where defense, I mean, dissent becomes about signaling rather than genuine transformation. And that's that. And we've talked about that before. You know, it's like scratching the itch, the virtue, signaling. It's like, are you actually changing people's minds? Are you transforming or fixing anything? Or is this just sort of some sort of dissident masturbation?
- [44:59]
Gal Beckerman
Yeah, no, no. It is for sure a danger. It's for sure a danger. And I worry about it. But I think, look, protest has two functions. It's about projecting power to those in power, saying we are a mass of people with our bodies who are showing you that we're against XYZ issue. But it's also about reinforcing people's sense of connection to one another within the protest. And I think that that is just as important of a function. We often forget about it because we think we want to know what the numbers were and you know, will it lead to, you know, immediately whenever one of these no Kings Day happens? The question is, will this translate into electoral victories for Democrats in the midterm elections? And I think it's such not the right question. It's about, you know, are you, are you sort of slowly building up more and more Americans who are willing to think of themselves as citizens first and not as, you know, as people who, you know, are just reacting or showing off. So.
- [46:01]
Charlie Sykes
So yeah, it did strike me that many of your definitions of what it took to be a dissident would also apply to how to be a good citizen. That it is really kind of a thoughtful citizenship as well as a moral actor. These things feel like they're a continuum.
- [46:20]
Gal Beckerman
I would agree with that. I did some recent reporting on Hungary just after Orban lost, because I was interested in one particular question, a question you might actually find interesting too, which is how people were able to split off from their identities as loyal Orban voters. You know, because just like here, you know, they had 15 years of, of being seeing themselves in this way, you know, like people who are in the MAGA camp. And I learned that about two years ago, these little kind of civic minded groups started up all over rural Hungary, which was the stronghold, the heartland of Orban support. They called them islands. And these islands were people who were not willing to break with Orban yet, but were some somehow dissatisfied with some aspect of their lives. And they, and they met together to do things like very banal things like organize trash pickups in their village, you know, or paint bus benches. And then they started talking about things that, you know, they were not happy about, like a local factory that was polluting, you know, or a school that had an issue. And eventually these people were able to sort of tiptoe away from their loyalist urban position to becoming citizens who felt like they had a choice that they could make in, in the election. I mean, they eventually became a lot more political. They started, you know, registering people to vote, then choosing candidates. But I, I was really fascinated with this sort of, with this move away from, from an identity that is wrapped up with this sort of tribal.
- [47:52]
Charlie Sykes
So hard.
- [47:54]
Gal Beckerman
Yeah, but they did it through a return to citizenship, which I found really fascinating.
- [48:00]
Charlie Sykes
It reminds me of where you mentioned before, your neighborliness as well. And it's also pre political. This is something that I think is really an interesting phenomenon, is that if you start off at the top, you know, Trump sucks and everything, you know, people get their backup, you know, and I obviously think he does. But, but if you leave out that top line, you don't talk about the politics that, and you go for the shared values, you know, we know, shared decency, you know, love of the community, you know, wanting a better life for your children. There's a lot more commonality. And if you can build some sort of a relationship there, maybe you can work your way back up the ladder as opposed to top down. That takes time. It takes, you know, face to face. And so I'm going to, you know, I guess the contradiction is that, yes, you need to be alone. I am, I am a middle functioning level introvert. But also the most valuable things that I've seen are when people get together and they look around, they realize we're not alone.
- [48:56]
Gal Beckerman
Alone.
- [48:56]
Charlie Sykes
We are not alone. And we have a lot in common and we can make common cause.
- [49:01]
Gal Beckerman
Yeah, I think that that's true. And I, you know, again, I look at Minneapolis was a moment for me where I, I really feel like people did tap into those sort of pre political ideas and it had an effect. I mean, when you think about the administration pulling ice out of there, I don't think it's just because the people were killed. Although obviously that created the dramatic moment that, that really accentuated everything that was wrong about ISIS presence in the city. I think it was that, you know, and, and I heard this, I read interviews with people who were not, you know, they were, they were Republicans who were saying this feels, this feels. And the words they were using were interesting. They said this feels inhuman. You know, this feels not, you know, not neighborly. This feels, you know, it, it goes against our sense of community. Like these, these very fundamental aspects that I think anybody can connect with. And I think that somewhere in the, the big brain of the, of the administration, they understood that this was not a winner because there were enough people who were witnessing this thing. They did, just like there were, you know, not to draw too much of an analogy, but just like there were northern whites who were watching, you know, black children being, you know, hosed down and attacked by dogs in Birmingham, you know, and, and they said, oh, this can't. We have to do something about this because like people are, this is touching people in this very pre political place. And I think, I mean, the dreamy part of me imagines a politics that can return to that. I've been heartened the last few days just reading a ton of articles about the resistance to AI and how it's crossing a lot of partisan lines. There are groups that are Republican and Democrat groups that are both, both really have the same kind of fundamental problems about how this is sort of chipping away at some basic conditions of life that we treasure. And the protests against data centers and what they're doing to small communities. These are all issues that I think, I wish for a politics that sort of understands those pre political motives or desires among people and finds a way to sort of knit them.
- [51:16]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I mean, speaking of pre political, I mean, a year and a half ago, I don't think I would have said this, but the dissident role of the church right now, the Catholic Church rising, I mean, there's lots of history, whether it's the civil rights movement or the abolitionist movement or the fall of the Soviet Union with an earlier Pope. But it is interesting. You're talking about, about people looking at something and saying, you know, that's inhuman. When you have the Pope and the entire Catholic Church saying to the administration, that's not Christian, that is not moral. Those are the things that is an issue. It feels as if that's one of those moments where if people are willing to sit on that and think about that and Christians who have the sunken cost of supporting MAGA are willing to go, okay, you know, what do we actually believe? What would Jesus. These things strike me as the kind of things that you're describing that would, you know, are completely pre political, that could have very significant political ramifications.
- [52:19]
Gal Beckerman
Yeah, yeah, no, it's very true. And it's so, it's so challenging to Trump administration because there's nothing, you know, I mean, and you know, you can attack the Pope, which, you know, I guess Trump is willing to do. But, but, but the things, you know, but I, I, you know that moment where the Pope says, who am I? Who am I? Am I supposed to be afraid of the Trump administration? Like, you know, I'm speaking my faith. And that is, that is incredibly powerful because I do think that it cuts underneath so much of the back and forth that, that we see in our, in our political life.
- [52:56]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I don't know if it's just me, but this book, this book really kind of hit me. It hit home as someone who has been a dissident of sorts for more than a decade now and has had to go through this. So I really did appreciate the book. And my guess is that you're going to find that this book kind of resonates with people from my very, very small tribe, particularly. The book is how to be a Dissident. It is probably one of the most relevant, powerful things that I have read. This author, Gall Beckerman, writes for the Atlantic. We will post notes, we will post links to Gall's writing, but also to where you can buy the book. Thank you so much for your time and your insight today. I appreciated it.
- [53:46]
Gal Beckerman
Thank you. This is wonderful to talk to you.
- [53:48]
Charlie Sykes
And thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. You know why we do this again? Today's a perfect example. Just to remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. Thank you.
- [54:09]
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